Left I on the News

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Capitalism kills

More patients die in the US from diseases that could be treated by timely intervention than in any other leading industrialised country, a study by senior health academics showed on Monday.

"If the US performed as well as the top three countries in the study" - France, with 65 deaths per 100,000, and Japan and Australia, both with 71 per 100,000 [the U.S. rate is 110] - "there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year," the authors write in the journal Health Affairs.

The study looks at preventable deaths below the age of 75 and found that while most countries had made big strides in reducing them over the past decade, with an average fall of 17 per cent, the US experienced only a 4 per cent decline.